Musings & Thoughts
K.S.O.N
07/28/26
Some neighborhoods announce themselves with welcome signs.
Mine announced itself with an antenna.
Long before I knew what a radio station was, before I understood that grown-ups named things after call letters and frequencies, I knew those four letters standing high above the neighborhood: KSON. They were among the first letters I learned to recognize. K. S. O. N. As soon as they appeared against the sky, I knew we were almost there.
Almost to Logan.
Almost to my uncle’s house.
Almost to my favorite cousin.
Children don’t measure distance in miles. They measure it in landmarks that promise love.
The antenna meant laughter was coming. It meant my grandmother settling into stories she had told a hundred times before. It meant someone stirring beans or roasting chiles, tortillas wrapped in towels to keep warm, murals that stretched higher than I could imagine, their colors louder than any language I knew. It meant Chicano Park before I understood history. Art before I knew the word movement. It meant Sunday afternoons riding in my uncle’s gleaming 1950s Chevy, where every turn felt like celebration.
Somewhere in those visits, I also found a word that felt like it had been waiting for me.
Chicana.
I was five years old.
I carried it home the way children carry treasures without knowing why anyone would object. My mother, practical and deeply conservative, didn’t love the word. To her, it carried politics. To me, it carried the feeling of Logan. It sounded like the murals looked. Like laughter around my uncle’s table. Like music drifting through open windows. Like a community that somehow already knew me.
I understand now that identity often arrives before explanation. We belong somewhere long before we know how to explain why.
This morning, driving that same road to Logan Memorial, I caught myself looking for those letters.
The antenna is no longer what it once was. Time has its own way of editing a city. But my heart still slows at the same place. My body remembers before my mind does.
And then another realization quietly arrived beside me.
The little girl in the backseat has become the superintendent driving the car.
What was once simply the road to my uncle’s house is now the road to children whose futures I have been entrusted to help shape. Children who are memorizing their own landmarks without realizing it. Children who are learning which streets feel like home, which adults feel like safety, which classrooms tell them they belong. Children who are, perhaps without knowing it yet, discovering words that will one day become part of who they are.
I recognize myself in them; not because our stories are the same, but because I know what it means for a community to quietly raise a child.
No one neighborhood made me.
Everyone did.
A grandmother’s tiny home. My favorite cousin. A bowl of menudo. Murals that taught me before teachers did. A 1950s Chevy. Four letters against the morning sky. A neighborhood that gave a five-year-old girl her first glimpse of herself.
It turns out memory has always been an educator.
It teaches us where we come from so we never forget what we owe those still making that same drive.
Because communities, long before they become places we serve, are places that first love us into being.
Calladita Te Ves Más Bonita
When people ask me about my why, I often think it began with a sentence, not an inspirational one, a limiting one.
"Calladita Te Ves Más Bonita" you're prettier when you keep your mouth shut. It's a phrase many Latina girls know by heart.
Sometimes it's spoken with affection, sometimes with frustration, sometimes as protection, but regardless of the intention, the message is remarkably consistent.
Take up less space, speak less, be agreeable, be beautiful, and be quiet.
I grew up with that idiom.
07/28/26
It shaped me long before I had the language to question it. As I wrote years ago, it creates an impossible choice. It conflates beauty with silence, forcing girls to believe that they can either have a voice or be accepted, but not both.
The older I became, the more I rebelled against that choice, not because I wanted to be loud, but because I wanted to be whole.(...) Education gave me something extraordinary.
It taught me that asking questions isn't disrespectful,(...) that curiosity is leadership, that disagreement can be an act of love, that using your voice isn't about speaking the most, it's about speaking when it matters most.
Today as superintendent, every decision I make is guided by that journey. My why is to create the conditions where no young person, especially no young Latina, ever feels she has to shrink herself in order to belong.
I want our schools to be places where they don't confuse compliance with confidence, where they learn that their questions have value, their stories have value, their language has value, their identities has value, their voice has value. So today when I hear "Calladita Te Ves Más Bonita," I don't reject it, I reframe it.
I offer our young Latinas something different.
"Que sepas que tu voz también es hermosa."
May you know that your voice is beautiful too, not because it's perfect, not because everyone will agree with it, but because it's yours.
My life's work isn't simply about leading a school district, it's about helping young people discover that they were never meant to fit inside someone else's definition of who they should be, especially the girls that were taught to whisper.
I hope they grow up believing something entirely different, that their brilliance deserves to be heard, that their courage deserves to be seen, and that the world becomes more beautiful every single time they decide to speak.
Manteca
My abuela always had manteca in her kitchen.
Not olive oil. Not avocado oil. Manteca. It sat there without apology, as ordinary as salt, as necessary as love.
I grew up hearing every warning about it, so I never bought any.
Until yesterday.
I wanted to make refried beans and, after looking everywhere for the humble little package I remembered, I found only a beautiful fifteen-dollar jar with words like organic and rendered dressed around it as if they were introducing someone important.
The beans were delicious.
This morning I made myself huevos rancheros. I let the tortilla kiss the manteca and thought, why not fry the egg there too?
The moment the egg hit the pan, my kitchen filled with my grandmother.
Not in ghost stories. In the language grandmothers prefer: smell. Sound. Sizzle.
For years I’ve been chasing her fried eggs-the ones with lace around the edges, a yolk like sunrise, a crunch that gave way to softness. I blamed my pans, my stove, my technique. Why couldn’t I make them?
The answer had been waiting patiently all along.
Manteca.
One small decision this morning brought my abuela back into my kitchen. Abuela Concha stood beside me without saying a word. She didn’t need to. She simply handed me back a taste I’d been missing for decades. For a few quiet minutes, the distance between then and now disappeared.
Gracias, Abuela Concha. You still know your way home.
07/25/26
Class of '27
Tomorrow we come together as unified leaders in anticipation of welcoming the rest of our colleagues and then our students- here's a little reflective poem about my "night before fretting" and a huge thanks to all who have worked on all the logistics and designed for belonging.
every year
the night before
i become a collector of invisible things.
i count chairs i will never sit in,
microphones i hope will behave,
maps, meals, parking lots,
the quiet mathematics of hundreds of people
arriving with their summers still clinging to them
a little saltwater,
a little mountain air,
children's laughter,
unfinished books,
gardens that grew while no one was watching,
the sacred idleness of an afternoon that asked nothing.
tomorrow we begin again.
not as three gatherings
carefully separated by title or assignment,
but as one.
because perhaps our district has been trying to tell us its own name all along.
unified.
not merely organized beneath a single banner,
but stitched together
the way forests share water underground,
the way constellations only become visible
when enough stars agree to belong to one another.
the work before us is too intricate
for lonely brilliance.
its questions refuse solitary answers.
they ask instead for conversation,
for interruption,
for borrowed wisdom,
for the miracle that happens
when someone from another school,
another department,
another story
says,
may I offer a different perspective...
i still hope the signs point the right way.
i still hope the technology remembers its job.
i still hope every presenter feels the peculiar tenderness
of colleagues leaning forward,
not because they have to,
but because they recognize one another's offering
as something worthy.
i hope no one leaves believing
their time was spent.
i hope they leave believing
it was invested
in one another.
but if i am honest,
my favorite part
will always be the hallways.
the embraces.
the how have you been?
the stories about grandchildren and new puppies,
about camping trips and novels,
about sleeping in,
about doing absolutely nothing
and discovering that nothing
can be holy.
i never ask these questions
to fill the silence.
i ask because i quietly believe
that the people entrusted with helping children flourish
should also have lives that flourish.
that somewhere between the agendas
and the strategic plans,
between literacy and mathematics,
between wellness and graduation,
there must remain room
for gardens,
for laughter,
for slow mornings,
for the people we become
when no one is asking us to produce.
perhaps that is where the school year truly begins
not with a keynote,
but with the simple miracle
of saying
i'm glad you're here.
and meaning
all of it.
07/22/26
Pride '26
Pride arrives dressed in rainbows, yes but also in clipboards and barricades, volunteers pointing toward parking lots, someone answering the same question for the hundredth time with the same generous smile. Joy, it turns out, has logistics. Belonging always has.
Today an entire city decided to walk toward one another. Music spilled into the streets. Hugs found old friends before words did. High fives leapt from strangers. Cameras tried their best to hold what the heart already knew. I even came home with a fan (thank you Claudia) as spectators support for marchers.
And then, there it was a yellow school bus rolling through the parade. Such an ordinary thing until it wasn't. A reminder that our work begins long before parades and continues long after them. That every young person deserves to step onto a bus, into a classroom, into themselves, knowing they matter exactly as they are.
The march wound through the heart of San Diego like a promise made visible: representation is beautiful, but it is unity that gives it breath. Thousands of people becoming one moving celebration, reminding one another that no one was ever meant to disappear.
By day's end my feet ached, the sun had claimed my body, my voice was a little hoarse from cheering, and my heart somehow larger than when morning began.
What a privilege to represent a school district that believes healthy identity development is not an extra, but an act of love. That belonging is not a slogan but a daily practice. That every child deserves to be seen before they are ever asked to achieve.
Perhaps that is what Pride has always been teaching us: when we make room for one another to become fully ourselves, an entire city becomes home.
07/18/26
